Rook (11 page)

“Am I right in thinking this man, this thief who was killed, was a Parisian, Cousin?” René was asking.

LeBlanc nodded. “You are correct.”

“Then perhaps you are the victim of a plot from our city, and should be looking for another Parisian? A traitor to Allemande?”

“Why, yes, René. It is indeed an enemy of Allemande that I seek. But it is a Commonwealth enemy, I think, not a Parisian one. Which brings me to an uncomfortable question, Monsieur Bellamy.”

This time he was addressing their father, who Sophia was certain had not been paying attention since the talk of a stabbing. She leaned back in her chair. The lights behind the glass were wavering, blurring her vision.

“I apologize for asking during your excellent dinner,” LeBlanc continued, “especially as we are to be family. But I have a witness who will swear to a Bellamy horse riding away from the inn after the murder of the Parisian. And this witness will also swear to a Bellamy being on the back of this horse.”

More silence at the table. Sophia’s pain multiplied, a persistent pressure trying to split open her forehead. Not Tom. Anything but Tom. She knew she had to do something, but she couldn’t think what.

“A horse …,” said Bellamy, voice trailing away in confusion.

“Sophie, are you all right?” Tom said, at the same time that René spoke something soft and harsh beneath his breath. The word had been “liar.”

LeBlanc leaned forward. “What did you say, Cousin?”

“I said I believe your witness to be a liar, Monsieur. I have already said that both Monsieur and Mademoiselle Bellamy were with me last night. Unless you are accusing their father, of course?”

Spear’s boots came back into the glowing dining room, their noise an extra ache in Sophia’s head.

“I think, young René,” said LeBlanc, “that we should be very careful who we are calling a liar here. And I also think you should perhaps look to your fiancée. She appears to be in distress.”

Sophia felt herself sliding from her chair. The world had shrunk to little pinpoints of glass and light, fear and fractured thoughts. Then there were arms around her.

“No, Hammond. I have her. Put that shawl over her.”

She smelled wood and resin. Good. René knew not to rip her stitches. Not to show the bloodstain. No one could see the bloodstain.

“Women,” LeBlanc said from some distant place, “are always prone to such things when upset …”

The starry pinpoints of light behind her eyes shrank, brightening once before they went out.

One of the flames behind the glass over LeBlanc’s head went out, a puff of smoke glazing the triangular pane with a thin film of black. Tom watched René carry Sophia out of the dining room, Spear and their father following close behind. Tom kept his hands beneath the table. Then he turned back to LeBlanc.

“We should have a conversation, I think,” Tom said.

LeBlanc’s smile came slow. “Indeed.”

“Here?”

“There is no such time as the present. And there is someone I would wish for you to meet. Paul!” LeBlanc called loudly. “Paul! You may come in now.”

The other, seldom-used door to the Bellamy dining room opened. Out of a long-abandoned pantry came a large man dressed in rough cloth, and he was dragging a girl behind him. Her short blond hair was bedraggled, freckled face tear-streaked, blood running down both her lower arms and dripping onto the rug. Paul ripped the gag from her mouth, her sobs becoming louder as four more men came into the dining room, swords drawn.

“You’ve been making free with my house, I see,” Tom said.

LeBlanc shrugged. “The Goddess has sent Luck to me in abundance.”

Tom shook his head. “Don’t cry, Jennifer.”

The girl cried harder. LeBlanc continued to smile, a livid, swollen thing on his face, and no one noticed Tom replacing the table knife onto the cloth beside his plate. The tip of the knife was now one more thing in the dining room that was bloodstained.

S
ophia
opened her eyes to a late, slanting sun shining through the windows. But it was sun coming from the wrong direction. And the mattress was wrong—sheep’s wool, not feathers—and the sheets smelled like wood. Cedar, now that she thought about it …

She sat up, gasping at the instantaneous pain in her side. She was in the north wing. A pile of clothes, male clothes, lay strewn across the seat of one of the great window arches, her burgundy dress over a chair, a sheathed sword flung onto the floor nearby. And there was a stranger, his hair just turning to gray, startling awake on a chair beside the bed.

“Who are you?” Sophia demanded.

The man scrambled to his feet.
“Je ne vous souhaite pas de mal, Mademoiselle …”

“Dites-moi votre nom!”
she said again. Then she realized she was in some sort of nightgown and snatched up the covers.
“Allez-vous en tout de suite!”
They both turned at a voice from the door.

“I thought you must speak my language, Miss Bellamy. Let me congratulate you on a very passable accent.”

René leaned on the doorjamb, hair down and a little wild, arms crossed over the shirt he’d worn the night before, now untucked. Sophia scooted back until she was fully upright, breath coming fast. She considered giving him a dose of her Lower City accent, though she doubted he would congratulate her on that.

“This is Benoit, by the way.” René turned his head to observe the man making his escape through the open door. “I think you have frightened him.” He peeled himself from the wood casing and strode into the room.

“Where is Tom?” she asked. “And Spear?”

“Hammond is out.”

“And where is Orla?”

“With your father.”

“And why am I in your room?”

“Because not knowing exactly who my dear cousin Albert wished to drop into a prison hole next, it seemed best to put you where you shouldn’t be instead of where you should. And where someone could keep an eye on you. Are you always this irritable when you wake, Mademoiselle?”

“When I wake in your bed with no idea how I got there? Yes. And I don’t believe you. Orla would not have left me here.”

René sat almost exactly as Benoit had, boots on the coverlet, chair leaning back against the wall on only two of its legs. Daughter stealer. “Your Orla is an excellent woman. We have had a very useful talk.” He stretched his arms up behind his head. “I think that irritation becomes you, Mademoiselle. It puts the pink in your pretty skin.”

Sophia gripped the blanket harder, feeling whatever pink might have been in her cheeks heat up to scarlet.

“I told you yesterday you had some concussion,” he continued. “Why did you not tell the others when you got back into the house?”

She shook her head, a movement that, to her relief, caused very little pain. “They may have been distracted by my bleeding.”

“Ah. I would have explained to them myself, but I was detained.”

“Yes …” She was waking up enough to remember caution. “And why exactly were you late to dinner again? You never said …”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head, the late light streaming through the window glass, making the red in his hair gleam. “No more, Mademoiselle. I know a sword wound when I see one, and I know better than to drink anything that comes from the hand of the Red Rook. I thought perhaps you were trying to drug me, and so you were. Thank you for doing away with my doubts.”

She blinked slowly, taking this in. “And you got out of the sanctuary how?”

“Benoit, of course. Eventually. If there was one place he knew I wasn’t, Miss Bellamy, it was in your rooms.” A grin crept into the corner of his mouth. “But, please, let me congratulate you on your climbing skills. I have been going out the windows since I arrived, and yet never did it occur to me that windows might be your favorite way to come and go as well. How pleasant to find that we have things in common. Perhaps when we are married, we will not need doors. It was most unfortunate that I climbed out yesterday without my picklocks. But it did give me the opportunity to finish exploring …”

Sophia moved, snatching up the sword from the floor and pulling it from its sheath before René could get his boots off the bed. She straightened, barefoot on the oak planks, and held the blade out in front of her, relieved that it wasn’t too heavy. René stood slowly, guarded, his smile gone as she circled her way around the foot of the bed, toward the open door, sword pointed at his chest. He took a step closer, then back as her blade made a flat arc through the air not far from the buttons of his shirt. He raised his hands. It was only a few more steps to the door, but René’s legs were much longer.

“Let me go,” she said.

“Not yet, Mademoiselle. We have things to discuss.”

“There is no discussion.”

René had inched forward, but he leapt back again as the metal swished past his middle. He grabbed the chair he’d been sitting on, putting it in front of him like a shield.

“When I go back to the Sunken City, it will be by my own choice,” she said. She dodged to one side and René stepped with her. “All I want is to leave this room, and for you to leave my family …”

He threw the chair at her head. Sophia ducked and the chair collided with the wall behind her, smashing the water ewer, and while she was avoiding a second concussion, René darted to the bedchamber door and kicked it shut. He stood in front of it, arms open wide.

“Run me through. I give you my permission.”

Sophia raised the sword, wary.

“But if you do, you will never hear what I have to say.” He paused. “Just think of the curiosity you will suffer.”

Sophia opened her mouth, unable to form a reply, when René tossed up both hands in frustration.

“You! Why must you ruin all of my shirts!”

Sophia glanced down. She had made her stitches bleed again. Just enough to stain her clothing, which was, indeed, one of René’s white shirts, and not near as much like a nightgown as she could have wished. The sword tip lifted to where it should be, her other hand creeping up to her open collar.

“Listen to me, Sophia. I know you are the Red Rook. But LeBlanc does not. He has taken Tom.”

The sword point lowered an inch. “What?”

“He has taken Tom to the Sunken City, where he will be executed for crimes against the Allemande government. There will be no trial. Tom has confessed.”

Sophia held the cloth about her chest, the sword in front of her, the worn oak planks solid beneath her feet. And yet she had the sensation of falling, falling with the wind rushing past and no bottom in sight. It was several moments before she found the breath to say, “What do you mean, he confessed?”

“To save his sister, unless I am wrong. And I am not wrong.” René reached over to the window seat and held out his gold jacket. For once there was no tease or grin around his mouth. “Put down the sword, Mademoiselle. We must talk.”

“Jennifer Bonnard went missing sometime after highsun, when the foxes were tracking your man on the chase, just before the family was to have left Mrs. Rathbone’s for their new location. Jennifer admitted to seeing your brother flee the Holiday on horseback, and identified him as the holy man who helped her family and eight others escape the Tombs.”

Sophia stood at Tom’s wardrobe, wrapped in the gold jacket, calf length on her, a new bandage and René’s bloody shirt beneath it, staring into one of Tom’s open drawers. He’d taken nothing with him. Did Jennifer really think it had been Tom in the holy man’s robes instead of her? Or had Jennifer chosen between them? Sophia glanced over her shoulder at René, waiting calmly in the doorway with his arms crossed.

“What did LeBlanc do to her?”

“Hammond says her arms were cut. Some places were burned.”

Sophia lifted her eyes to the window, where the last of the daylight was spinning the bracken field into autumn gold. She was going to break Albert LeBlanc, break him into a thousand tiny, evil pieces. She slammed shut the drawer that held too many of Tom’s things and pulled the next, nearly empty drawer all the way out of its slot, setting it aside. She reached an arm into the cavity, grimacing at the pain from her stitches. “And you said Tom was bleeding?”

“Yes. But I am certain he cut his leg himself. There was blood on the knife at the dinner table and on his chair.”

“And LeBlanc thinks a fresh cut made from a table knife is the same as a sword wound from the day before, does he?” She pulled out a packet of papers from their hiding place behind the drawer. Maps of the Sunken City, meticulously drawn by Tom, Spear, and her over several summers, plus a bag of Parisian francs and Commonwealth quidden. She was furious with Tom. How could he do this? But she was so much angrier with herself. “And Tom’s bad leg; I suppose that’s all just part of the disguise?”

“LeBlanc has a witness, and a wounded man in the right place at the right time who has confessed. He believes his Goddess has smiled on him, and he looks no further.”

She wanted so much to cry that it really was infuriating. She left the wardrobe and passed René with her handful of money and maps, walking as fast as she was able down the corridor. Which was not terribly fast. René came along behind. “Do you plan on following me everywhere I go?” she snapped.

“Since you never stand still, it is the only way to have a conversation with you, Mademoiselle. I have stopped fighting it.”

She rounded a corner and started up a stairwell. She had to get back to her room, get dressed, get Spear, and go get Tom. When René had also come around the corner, she said, “Did Spear follow LeBlanc to the port?”

“Yes. My cousin brought an escort of twenty Parisian gendarmes. You should be flattered he thought so many would be needed.”

Sophia stopped and turned. René paused midstep just behind her, looking up from where he’d been running a hand over the Ancient, pitted metal rail. She caught another glimpse of that intense scrutiny she’d seen in the sanctuary before he smoothed it away. Sophia held the gold jacket tight, the cold of the concrete step seeping through the matting to her bare feet, and asked, “Where is my father?”

René’s brows drew together, and then they both looked down the stairwell. There was a voice somewhere below them, deep, male, and near the front hall, insistent words bouncing off the paneling along with Nancy’s vague protests. But the name “Miss Bellamy,” spoken in a thick Manchester accent, was coming clearly up the stairs. Sophia clutched the bag of money and maps, the other hand going to her hair.

“It’s Mr. Halflife!”

“Who?”

“From Parliament! He’s heard about Tom. Is our wedding canceled?”

“What?”

“Your cousin is trying to execute my brother!” she hissed, holding her exasperation to a whisper. “No heir, and no marriage fee! Mr. Halflife has come to take the house!”

René’s brows came down farther. “I thought Bellamy had some time before that happened?”

“If Tom is executed, there’s no heir and they take the land anyway! And Father will be considered dependent because of the debt. Halflife will be wanting me to sign …”

René said something that Sophia had heard only in the back alleys of the Lower City, grabbed a flickering taper from the wall sconce, sprang up three stairs, and held out his hand. “Come!” he said, and then again. “Come!”

She went. Up the stairs, painfully, leaving the sounds of a full-blown argument behind them, and then René turned left down an unlit corridor ending in a large window, where another stairwell led to an upper floor. “What is in here?” he asked, throwing open a door opposite the stairs. He pulled her inside and shut the door.

It was a bedroom, one of its corners a small, round tower that looked over the cliffs to the sea. There’d been a time when all these bedrooms were in use, when an entire clan of Bellamys had lived under one roof, adding the rooms as they added the children. They’d been doing the opposite the past century. Closing the doors as they closed the coffins. The door to this room had been closed for a long time.

René was looking for another candle, but there wasn’t one, only an empty, rusting iron holder. He shoved the candle he had into it, doing little to illuminate the gloom of coming dusk and dark-papered walls. He picked up a blanket folded across the bed and shook it, making a dingy cloud before he held it out.